Building a secure web server with CentOS 5, part 2

Posted on 05.Jan 2010 by Ray Heffer in LAMP, Linux, Web Hosting

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Troubleshooting

Part 2: Configuring the Server

Configuring CentOS

  • Edit /etc/hosts and /etc/sysconfig/network with hostnames
  • Install Packages

Example of /etc/hosts:

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost
67.34.32.11 www.mydomain.com

Example of /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=www.mydomain.com

Installing Packages

# yum -y install httpd openssl-devel openssl mod_ssl vsftpd rpm-build rpm-devel autoconf automake lynx gcc
# yum -y install mysql mod_auth_mysql mysql-devel mysql-server
# yum -y install mod_python python python-devel
# yum -y install perl mod_perl mod_perl-devel openssl-perl perl-Convert-ASN1 perl-Date-Calc perl-DateManip perl-HTML-Parser perl-libwww-perl perl-CPAN perl-DBD-MySQL perl-XML-Parser
# yum -y install php-devel php php-domxml php-gd php-mbstring php-mysql php-ncurses php-pear
# yum -y install webalizer
# yum -y install sendmail sendmail-cf

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Building a secure web server with CentOS 5, part 3

Posted on 05.Jan 2010 by Ray Heffer in LAMP, Linux, Web Hosting

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Troubleshooting

Part 3: Adding websites

In the following steps, we will base our configuration on a fictitious company called Happy Burger who has already registered the domain name, happyburger.net. We will point www.happyburger.net to the IP address of this web server. When you are creating your own site, substitute the customer name and domain name for that of the actual customer. * If a Happy Burger really exists, then this is in no way associated with them and is purely coincidental.

Create a User Account

The first step is to create a user account that will be associated with this website and be used to authenticate via FTP. When creating the password, make sure that it is at least 8 characters, alphanumeric, mixed case and includes numbers. I usually generate random passwords for this.

# adduser –s /sbin/nologin happyburger
# passwd happyburger

Creating the directory structure

Each website must have the following directory structure in order to support access logs, web statistics, .htpasswd files, CGI scripts and the public web directory.

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